Chomsky, Moore, Fisk: Pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant

I appease, therefore I submit to tyranny. Chamberlain, left, and Harvard President Lawrence Summers, right, who has just resigned. As the appeasing Peter, Paul and Mary sang in a different context, "Oh, when will they ever learn?"

"A repressive society is a repressive society, wherever it may fall on a continuum of brutality and thought control," we blogged awhile back in our post "Fear societies, heavy and lite," where we cited former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's "mechanics that sustain such a society." Whether it's back in the gulags of the old USSR, in the imamically orchestrated "street" of today's Arab tyrannies or in the politically correct, ivy-covered towers in our own backyard at Harvard, intimidation is the blogtheme that keeps on giving. Cartoon Wars have it in spades, and now academia's Appeaser-in-Chief, Harvard President Lawrence Summers, is rumored to be about to submit his resignation in the wake of humiliating show trials and appeasement last spring. Enter, stage right, Eric S. Raymond of Armed and Dangerous [via Pajamas Media]:

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.

Raymond reminds us of the Gramscian underpinnings of the Soviet Union's insidious infiltration of our elite institutions last century -- blogged here and here -- offering a riveting checklist of "some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons," noting that "Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda":

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims.

Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Go make yourself a delicious Danish ham sandwich with Havarti and then come back and read the whole thing:

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

We feel better already.

Update:  Nobody says it better than Dr. Sanity:

In the history of academia, I don't think anyone has ever come closer to voluntary castration for the cause of radical feminism. And look where it got him.

According to news reports, Summers plans to return to the seraglio teaching at Harvard after a year's sabbatical.

Comments

[goomp]

Eric Raymond says only the truth. A large portion of the nation's faculty are nut-cakes indoctrinated by the Communist philosophies and are beyond redemption. Fortunately everyone who comes under their tutelage is not impressed by thier infantile reasoning.

[Glenmore]

I finally stopped my annual alumnus contributions shortly after 9/11. I now selectively donate those funds to schools and programs that truly educate, and/or exhibit good citizenship (e.g. Hillsdale College, Widener University), instead of U of North Carolina and Brown University.

[andophiroxia]

I am all for higher learning. However, most of the colleges that I have seen/been to, have degraded badly down to liberal indoctrination camps. It's not that these ideas are presented, but they are taught as truth and the only existing ideaology, instead of opening themselves up to a wellspring of ideas as they purport themselves to be. They don't care to teach facts or skills to go into the real world, but as snobby academia.